Goodbye, Porto

I find Portuguese to be completely baffling. With French and Italian, languages I also don’t speak, I feel like I can grab a word here or there, especially after a couple of glasses of wine. But Portuguese defies my brain’s expectations of acceptable linguistic sounds. Someone explained to me today that the name “Ramos” is pronounced “chamosh,” where the “ch” (representing the"R") is pronounced like it is in Yiddish, but that the letter R also has multiple other sounds depending on the context. I will stick to my cheerful Bom Dia! and Obrigado! and then keep walking.

I start my bike ride tomorrow and prepared for it today by doing a bike tour of Porto where I met some nice people from other countries who all asked me what the hell is going on in the United States, a question for which I didn’t have a great answer. They were all very nice and told me that things were just as bad in their countries, but I’m not sure I believe them.

Anyway, as it turns out, Porto isn’t just an old city with cobbled streets full of guys selling weed and hash. It also has a lively waterfront with a river, the Douro. 

There are six bridges that cross the Douro. One of them (the white one way in the back) was built in the 1960’s by the Portuguese dictator at the time who was on a Make Portugal Great Again kick and decided to stop inviting engineers and designers from across Europe to come and make bridges and instead do the whole project from beginning to end with Portuguese labor. When the bridge was done, no one would drive over it because no Portuguese people trusted a bridge that was designed and built by Portuguese people.  After about a year of virtually no use, the government had the idea of putting on a military parade where tanks and large trucks would go over the bridge; the point of all this was to show how sturdy the bridge was. And it worked, the bridge is still standing and used by lots of people every day.

This is the main market in Porto. I really wanted to take a picture of the flower section, but all of the flower vendors had signs up saying that anyone who took a picture also had to buy a flower. Thus, the fruit.

This is the famous Porto train station. If you happen to have a spare 22,000 hand-painted tiles, I have an idea of what you can do with them.

And even though I haven’t started by bike ride, I experienced a minor disaster this evening when I learned that an extremely friendly, extroverted middle-aged couple from California is doing the same route as me on the same days. I haven’t yet told them that I travelled 3,500 miles specifically not to be with people on this bike ride. I suspect that this is going to be an undercurrent of the coming week. They told me their names, but I was deliberately not paying attention and will be referring to them from this point on as “The Californians.”

And so as not to end on a low note, here’s an entertaining story. JK Rowling lived in Porto while the ideas for the Harry Potter books were germinating. After the movies came out, some people thought that the staircase in a Porto bookstore resembled a staircase in the movies. Over time, more and more people came to the bookstore to take pictures of the stairs. JK Rowling issued a statement saying that she had never been to the bookstore and had never seen the stairs, only fueling the feeling among fans that those stairs were in fact the inspiration for Harry Potter. Sensing a commercial opportunity, the bookstore started selling entry tickets for €8 per person just to get into the store. When I walked by there today, there were at least 100 people waiting in line to get in and take a picture of the stairs that are not featured in Harry Potter movies.